The following Saturday, Rochdale was jumping and the concert had begun. It was still light outside around dinnertime and there were about five live performances planned through until midnight. I was in my apartment on the fourteenth floor, and the concert was below me on a large cement patio off the mezzanine floor that stretched the length of the building. The hundreds of people milling below me looked like ants wearing colourful Mexican shirts. Even though the terrace was huge, it was still far too crowded so people were hanging out of their windows watching or lowering dope down on a rope to the party (that way if plain-clothes cops caught them, they could always run to another room within the building).
I sat at my desk, with a Canada Council grant proposal spread in front of me; I hoped to get funded for my Ph.D. However, I was procrastinating and reading The Sound and the Fury.
I remember the exact spot I was at in the novel — Caddy was up a tree and her brothers were looking up her skirt at her muddy underwear — when it happened. Suddenly I saw a shadow fall across my book or maybe I heard a scream. Possibly I saw a tiny bit of orange out of the corner of my eye. I looked out my window and saw a body plummet past. Then I heard a thud on the pavement, and then another. I ran to the window. One body had hit the pavement while the other had landed on a canvas awning or a tent set up for the day, and then rolled off and dropped one or maybe two floors to the cement patio. The bodies below me looked like Humpty Dumpty twins splayed on the pavement. One looked like a ginger crab you order in Chinese restaurants, his claws closed in front of him. It was wearing an orange flannel shirt.
Someone grabbed the mike and told the audience it was Ginger and another guy named Neuter, who was well known in the building for his uncanny ability to “smell narcs.” Neuter died on impact. Ginger, luckier than the cat he’d killed, had nine lives. He was still alive; the awning had broken his fall. That day the local news reported fifty drug overdoses had been delivered to local hospitals. Three were dead on arrival.
I later learned Neuter and Ginger had taken acid and were convinced they could fly so they jumped off the roof of the eighteen-floor high-rise. Ginger had snapped and he spent two years, on and off, physically crumpled in the hospital and had more than fourteen surgeries. I went to visit him once, and he said he was lucky to have remained loose when he took his dive and even luckier to have fallen on the awning, which, the doctor said, saved his life. He had to drink through a tiny straw since his jaw was mostly wired shut. I had to lean close to his mouth to hear him as he whispered that after I’d confiscated that joint from him, he’d slipped another one in the manila envelope that held Professor Enright’s paper. Even in his pathetic situation, I yelled, “You idiot!”
He couldn’t smile, but I could see his eyes dance with merriment. At that moment, Crystal came into his hospital room and said that Ginger could only visit with me for five minutes. His eyes clouded with rage, but he was stuck. He had to count on her now. I waved goodbye.
CHAPTER 18
german influences
A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.
— Jean de La Fontaine
After I got my M.A. in fall 1971, I was at a crossroads. I could leave the university with an M.A. and get a job, or do a Ph.D., albeit not as the Coleridge notebook scholar. Several other professors had asked me to go on and work with them. The Ph.D. option had three drawbacks. First, I would have to teach. Second, I would have to go where the jobs were, like the Canadian prairies. Third, I was beginning to realize that academia was as much a closed shop as Rochdale, and nearly as deluded. Each discipline subdivided into fiefdoms that looked after their own. Just as Professor Coburn was a star in her world, Ginger had been a star in his. All you had to do was surround yourself with people who wanted what you were peddling.
Before signing up for the academic long haul, I decided that I should work for a year and not run the risk of knowing only academia. Besides I didn’t feel like academia was an exact fit for me.
A few months after I finished my last paper, I opened the mail and there was my Master’s degree all rolled up in a tube. An attached letter stated that I had missed graduation and therefore my degree had been shipped. Just as I was wondering when the hell graduation had been, I heard CRUD, the Rochdale radio station, switch on overhead and crackle to life. The voice blared, “Emergency, emergency, not a bust but a cultural must. Tonight at 7:30 at University College at the University of Toronto begins the great film festival on German influence on John Ford. A double bill followed by a speaker. This is heavy stuff and I would suggest hopping a stagecoach and getting on over there. Giddy up!” The usual ear piercing static followed this and CRUD signed off.
I needed to celebrate getting my Master’s so I decided to go to the films. I was actually excited to attend since I had seen all of John Ford’s films as well as all of Fritz Lang’s and did, in fact, notice that Ford, the ultimate Irish American director, adopted some German Expressionist influences in some of his later films. I wanted to see them together to pinpoint the influences.
Rochdale had helped with my film education, since the powers that be showed a movie every Sunday night. It cost a dollar, but if you went naked you could get in for free. I saw some of the greatest films in my life there, albeit fully clothed. (I didn’t relish sitting nude on cold chairs in a Canadian winter to prove a point about my personal freedom.) I saw all of Bergman, all of Truffaut, the most important German directors and almost every other important foreign film. However, I was sick of seeing all the naked bodies in the elevator. I felt like giving some of the bodies a dollar just to cover up.
I threw on my multicoloured toque (the French-Canadian name for a wool-knitted hat) since it was starting to get chilly in the fall and dashed over to University College. In my first winter in Canada when Mr. Toady Henchman said he needed a toque to warm up, I thought he meant “toke” and I told him I didn’t have any. He asked, “What is that red, green, yellow and orange thing on your head?”
When I walked into University College, I was knocked out by its beautiful architecture. It reminded me of the University Museum in Oxford with its medieval revival styles — Gothic and Romanesque. It was built in the nineteenth century and you could see that the style and shape were influenced by Ruskin’s ideas.
I entered a huge lecture hall and faced hundreds of empty chairs lined up in forlorn rows. I was a bit late and out of breath. There were only two people sitting near the front. When I got up close, I could see they were two guys about my age. I figured I might as well join them; it was stupid to sit alone in a huge lecture hall, especially since there was a speaker.
I should have a sociological sidebar here to say that I was relatively new to Canada — I was only beginning my second year. Now that I have been here for over forty years, I have finally figured out that it is a very different place from America. It is not that weird in America to join others in a lecture hall and introduce yourself. It is a little forward but not over the top. In Canada, it is definitely over the top. I didn’t know that then. I would never have joined others when uninvited in England because there the rules are clear: never address a stranger unless there are bombs falling and you need shelter. Otherwise you look disturbed, in a manic state or, worse, American.
I came to learn that this form of friendliness is what Canadians dislike most about Americans. They see this friendliness as phony because you are not their “real” friend. My father, who was a typical American, used to say, “What does it cost to be friendly? You only go around once.”
I had my multicoloured toque atop my waist-length blond hair and wore my Oxford favourite, the long, hairy sheepskin fur vest that curled and smelled like mutton in the damp weather. I also had on my blue suede short boots, which I had bought because of the song Elvis made famous called “Blue Suede Shoes.” I plopped down panting next to the two guys and said, “Hi, I can’t believe that I just heard ab
out this festival ten minutes ago and dashed over.” They nodded as though I were a bag lady begging for popcorn. I introduced myself and actually had to say, “And you are … ?” One said his name was Carl. He was about my height and weight and had delicate features and a tentative smile. The other smiled my way and I felt that smile down to my blue suede soles. He had one of those grins that could never be mistaken for a smirk or a snicker. It filled his whole face. He was easily six-and-a-half feet tall. He wasn’t big in that vulgar, fleshy football kind of way, but in a lithe, lanky way. He sort of looked like Abe Lincoln with edge. He had shoulder-length black curly hair and large features, the kind you would have if you were drawing a caricature of someone. Even his teeth were large, like Chiclets. But I thought he was really gobsmackingly gorgeous, not in a traditional leading-man kind of way, but more like a character actor. From the side, his face looked elongated, like the figures in an El Greco painting.
He said his name was Michael. When I said I had just finished my Master’s and was out to celebrate, he lit up with another smile that could brighten the gothic gargoyles in the corners of the room and said, “Congratulations,” and he shook my hand like I had done something really great. (My mother, on the other hand, hadn’t even forwarded me the letter about graduation. She said she assumed it would be too hot to attend.)
I could tell by the way he pronounced the letter R in congratulations that he was American. He was either from the Bronx or Brooklyn — somewhere funky near Manhattan.
As it turned out, this was only one of the things I was wrong about. I said, “Hey, man, you just came here from the States, right?”
“Right,” he said.
“Where were you?”
“Grad school.”
“Where?”
“Cornell.”
“In what?”
“Engineering.”
“Building bridges or theoretical?”
“Theoretical — games theory.” When I still looked quizzical, he added, “A kind of applied math.”
It turned out he and Carl shared a house in Toronto. Michael had taken a leave of absence from Cornell and Carl was doing a Ph.D. in philosophy on Heidegger.
The lights dimmed and some academic who’d been flown in for the evening began speaking about the influence of German expressionism on John Ford. Basically all he said was that Ford was influenced by German Expressionism, went to Germany, came back and then did some of his best work. I leaned over and said to the guys next to me, “Wonder how much they paid that guy to come and tell the three of us that.” They just looked at me blankly, as though I was being rude while Mr. Academic was droning on.
We were to see Nosferatu, made in 1922 by the German Expressionist Murnau, followed by John Ford’s Four Sons, made in 1928.
While we were watching Nosferatu, I kept telling the guys to watch the use of long shadows and static shots.
Carl said, “I know,” and Michael just nodded.
During Ford’s Four Sons, there is a great scene when the mailman comes to the door but is preceded by his elongated shadow. I said, “Guys, look. That is the same shadow as in Nosferatu, foreshadowing that the sons have died in the war.”
“We see it,” Carl said.
I had no idea that Ford had so many German influences and kept up a running commentary on all of them for Carl and Michael. Over the next four hours, we saw Fritz Lang’s M and then John Ford’s The Informer. I said, “Wow, this time Ford tried to use Lang’s idea of making the villain pardonable, allowing us to get into the mind of the informer. You know what I mean?” Not pausing, I said, “It isn’t working. Lang knew how to make people appear ill and not evil, but Ford hasn’t managed it here. The soliloquy doesn’t work as Peter Lorre’s did in M.”
Carl said, “Actually I can’t hear it.”
“Nor can I,” said Michael.
“That’s weird because I can hear it,” I said, shaking my head. What were these guys, deaf?
>> <<
After the movies, it was past midnight, and I was still spouting forth all the German influences I’d seen. They just nodded. As we walked out of the hall, I was bubbling over with enthusiasm. “Guys, isn’t it amazing that out of the whole city, of millions of people in Toronto, there are only three of us interested in the German influence in Ford’s work? Wow, now we’re together! We have to go somewhere to discuss the films.”
Neither of them jumped on this idea.
“Where do you live?” Carl asked.
“Rochdale.”
“Rochdale?” Carl glanced at Michael.
“Yeah, let’s get a burger at Zumburger’s.”
“Zumburger? I haven’t been there in years. Speed freaks eat there. It’s fast food,” Carl said.
I’d never heard the term “fast food” before. I thought it meant something good, as in fast service. What did he want — slow food? Confused, I said, “Well, that’s what we need right now, isn’t it?”
Anyway, we were walking right by Rochdale after the movie, so I said, “We could go to Etherea and get cosmic sandwiches and take them to my ashram. There’s actually a living room and kitchen. I used to share it with a dope dealer, but he jumped off the roof in the summer, believing he could fly. He was unfortunately mistaken. He’s alive, but probably won’t be back. So now the huge place is mine.”
Carl and Michael exchanged wary glances and finally nodded in agreement. We got our cosmics and walked into the elevator. Carl stepped on my foot by mistake since I had not moved very far back in the elevator. (I never stood very far back because sometimes you had to pry the doors open on your floor. Plus pets went out on their own and sometimes didn’t make it.) When he stepped on my foot, I broke into my rendition of “Blue Suede Shoes.” The taller of the two, Michael, broke into the second verse: “You can burn my house, Steal my car, / Drink my liquor from an old fruit jar.” And we laughed all the way to the fourteenth floor. His bursting into song had that kind of American insouciance that made me feel at home.
I thought I had better warn them about the mounds of dope and the scales and the biker bodyguards but, then again, they weren’t born yesterday.
We sat eating our cosmics in the living room at the long dope table, and when I had finally run dry of German influences, I asked Michael about Cornell. He said he lived in a large co-op house with eleven people and everyone had to take a turn at cooking, shopping and cleaning up for one-week stints. He explained you were run off your feet for one week, but then you had a ten-week rest in a clean house with great meals every night. (Some of the people from that co-op moved on to cook at the Moosewood Restaurant, which was the test kitchen for what would become the famous Moosewood Cookbook.)
I said, “Yeah, I never got involved with that kind of thing because it was always the women who wound up doing it and I had no idea how to do it, so I just ate on my own.”
He said, “Well, the people in this house were active politically and in the feminist movement.”
“What’s the feminist movement?” I asked.
He looked at me as though I was from an Annette Funicello movie. Was this something I should know? I had been only reading nineteenth-century texts for a year and had been living in Toronto, where bars still had a “Ladies and Escorts” entrance and another for “Gentlemen Only.” Nothing was ever open on Sunday in Ontario. And before that, I was in England and Ohio. I had been in spots that were clearly the last link in the information food chain.
“Haven’t you heard of Germaine Greer’s new book, The Female Eunuch? It just came out last year. I think it is still in hardcover. I have a copy I’ll lend to you if I ever run into you again,” Michael said.
>> <<
The next morning, I called long distance to my friend Leora and said I had finally met some interesting guys to go to film festivals with. I said I liked the tall guy.
“You have never liked any man under six-five. Small appendages are not your thing,” she reminded me.
“He is a weird combination of things. He is an engineering-math guy from Cornell grad school; he had read the Faulkner that he saw lying around in my room and, get this, he knew the lyrics, the second verse I might add, to ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’”
Leora took in all the information and then agreed that the blue suede shoes bit augured well.
“And he started talking about a thing called feminism. Ever hear of it?”
She said, “Of course. Remember that book you gave me called The Feminine Mystique? The one you got from that woman who was in the audience you read to in Buffalo?”
“Oh, yeah that.”
“Well, that was the kickoff.”
“What are they fighting — men?”
“Patriarchy. Read up on it.”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t think that movement will affect my life much. If I recall, that book said you didn’t have to be a caregiver, take care of others and cook and give up your life for your family. I never was a caregiver or a cook, and I never plan on having a husband or family. So neither my mother nor I have any bad habits to kick. Still it was nice of that Michael guy to offer me that eunuch book. Have you read it?”
“Are you kidding? That book was so powerful I hid it from my mother. I was worried she’d get a divorce or think her life was meaningless if she read it.”
Coming Ashore Page 24